Girl Scout Robbers Angry Over Arrest
A couple of teen girls in Boynton Beach, Fl., may be the worst criminals in the world. They allegedly mugged a pair of Girl Scouts on Wednesday for $167 in cookie money, drove off, then returned to the scene later to taunt the scout and talk to a TV reporter.
Meet the teens:
"We went through all that effort to get it, we got all these charges and we had to give the money back," one of the teens told TV station WPBF. "I'm kind of pissed." As if this story weren't already surreal enough, WPBF's web site runs video and a picture of the accused muggers, but then explains that "names are not being released because they are minors."
Weblogs Win Long Bet with New York Times
The Long Bet Foundation, the group that sponsored a five-year wager between blogging evangelist Dave Winer and New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz over the journalistic value of weblogs vs. the media, announced today that it has declared a winner.
The foundation used the same source I did to pick the top five news stories of 2007 -- a vote by Associated Press editors and news directors -- and reached the same conclusion: Weblogs won.
Adding up page rank winners blogs win 4 to 1. Adding up page rank winners of user submitted content vs. commercial content, user submitted content wins 3-2. If you average page ranks of the NYT (avg rank 56.2) vs. blogs (avg. rank 13.2) Blogs win. If you use an average rank of user submitted content (avg. rank 8.8) vs. commercial (avg. rank 1.8) Commercial news outlets win.
The foundation also took the opportunity to lament the wording of the bet, which made it difficult to determine a winner:
The premise of this bet is excellent, but unfortunately the arguments were quite vague on how to adjudicate the bet. Long Bets encourages bettors to construct arguments that involve the least amount of interpretation possible. Once this bet came up for adjudication we urged both parties to come to their own decision, but they asked Long Bets to be the final arbiter. ...
My unofficial declaration of a winner generated a lot of debate here on Workbench and other blogs. People challenged almost everything -- the language of the bet, the news value of weblogs and the mainstream media, the relevance of Wikipedia and my own judgment -- but there was one player in this drama that nobody questioned.
Everyone accepted as a given that Google's search results would be useful to people looking for news, whether the top-ranked articles came from blogs or the Times.
Revisit the Google search results for AP's top five stories of 2007 as if you're looking for news:
For broad keywords like these, Google's a crappy news-gathering tool in its regular search results. You have much better luck with Google News, but it's not an egalitarian arbiter of news trustworthiness that could settle a bet. Google hand-picks the media sources indexed by that service, favoring mainstream media and excluding blogs.
You're a Sad Man, Charles Schulz
There's been considerable debate in blogs I read over Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of Charles Schulz written by David Michealis. Roleplaying game developer Robin Laws reviews the book:
Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis, is a completely absorbing, stunningly researched, pain-scorched biography of the last century’s most influential cartoonist.
Charles Schulz's genius was built on traits common to great artists: unstinting discipline, narrowness of focus, solipsism, arrogance, self-doubt, independence, competitiveness, an embracing humanism, hunger for the new, a sense of unquenchable aloneness, and a taste for passive aggressive revenge.
I knew enough about Charles Schulz going in to understand that his avuncular public image belied a lifelong sense of torment and so wasn't shocked or surprised to learn of his dark side. What did startle me was just how autobiographical Peanuts turns out to be.
I'm eager to read this book. Though Schulz' widow Jeannie has publicly rejected the portrayal of her husband as someone who "couldn't love and couldn't believe that he was loved," there's an oppressive gloom to Schulz that I've always found fascinating. I read every Peanuts paperback I could get my hands on as a kid, identifying with the block-headed kid who could never catch a break, yet never stopped thinking Lucy might let him kick the football.
RSS 0.90, 0.91 Moving to RSS Advisory Board
Netscape announced this afternoon that the first two versions of RSS, RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91, are moving to the RSS Advisory Board.
The RSS specification documents, DTDs, and help files for the first versions of RSS (v0.9, v0.91) are being moved to RSSBoard.org, where they will be hosted by the RSS Advisory Board in perpetuity. Netscape will continue to host these files (via redirect) on the My Netscape domain (my.netscape.com) until August 1st, 2008.
Netscape launched RSS on March 15, 1999, with the My Netscape Network and an RSS 0.90 specification written by Ramanathan Guha. Four months later, RSS 0.91 was launched with a specification written by Dan Libby. Five years after revolutionizing the web browser, Netscape sparked another revolution on the web with XML-based syndication.
All websites that produce RSS 0.9 or RSS 0.91 feeds will need to either convert to using the current standard (RSS v2.0), or if desired, convert their v0.9/v0.91 feeds properly using this guide, provided by the RSS Advisory Board, by August 1st.
The board will ensure the continued availability of the specifications and the RSS 0.91 DTD (document type definition), which still receives four million hits a day from XML parsing software. We could use some advice from Apache admins on how to serve a file that often without reducing the HTTP server to a smoldering heap of rubble.
In the eight years since Netscape published the first RSS specification, the format has become as essential to the web as HTML, XHTML and CSS. By my estimation, the specs and related DTDs have been requested from Netscape's servers more than one billion times.
As the current chairman of the board, I'd like to thank Guha and Libby for their work on the first two versions of RSS and more recent Netscape employees Chris Finke and Tom Drapeau for helping this transition. Though most RSS feeds use the current version today, thousands of feed publishers continue to employ RSS 0.9 and RSS 0.91. Long after Netscape closed the first incarnation of the My Netscape Network and had no business interest in RSS, the company contributed to the success of web syndication by keeping these documents online.
Small Donations, Loosely Justified
I'm the example in a new BusinessWeek article on small donors in political campaigns, who apparently have less impact than we think:
Rogers Cadenhead wants to have an impact on this year's Presidential election. So he's heeded online appeals for contributions, making $25 to $40 donations to candidates including Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), former Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), and Representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.). "The allure of one-click participation in democracy was too hard to resist," says Cadenhead, a 40-year-old computer book author and the publisher of the liberal-leaning political blog the Drudge Retort. "I'm not the kind of person who gets called for real donations."
Cadenhead and millions of individuals like him are nonetheless being courted by the candidates. Presidential hopefuls are grabbing their attention -- and contributions -- with donation requests embedded in blogs, e-mails, social networks, YouTube (GOOG) videos, and their own Web sites. ...
Small donors like Cadenhead are undeterred in making political contributions, no matter how small. Individual donations are keeping some candidates like Kucinich from dropping out of the race altogether. For many candidates, even a small donation is an indication of support at the polls, where it matters most. "It's an easy way to vote early," says Cadenhead.
In describing my donations to reporter Catherine Holahan, it was hard not to sound insane. I've given $25 to Edwards and Obama, $50 to Paul and $250 to the candidate I finally settled on: Joe Biden (sigh). That last amount grew from $25 to the federal-matching maximum after a Biden volunteer called me the day before the Iowa caucus. When your candidate concedes before your donation clears the bank, it's probably a bad investment.
Since giving my first political donation to Howard Dean in 2004, I've decided that an early contribution of $25 is a good way to start learning about a candidate. Give a politician a dollar and you never get rid of 'em. I get regular emails from Obama, his wife Michelle and Ron Paul along with text messages from Edwards before each debate.
Holahan first contacted me by email, so my server logs reveal how she found me for the story. She searched Google Monday for i gave $25 to ron paul.
Giving money to Paul was more fun before I knew that he published a newsletter that earned nearly $1 million a year in the early '90s and contained articles that expressed loathsome prejudice towards gays and blacks. Even if you believe that Paul did not write the articles himself, that means they were either written with his approval (just as bad) or completely without his knowledge.
That last possibility, the most generous to Paul, demonstrates staggering blindness to what underlings were doing in his name -- one of the worst flaws a president could have.
10 Years Ago Today, Matt Drudge Broke the News
On Jan. 17, 1998, Matt Drudge reported that Newsweek had spiked Michael Isikoff's story about President Clinton's sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, the first shot in the war between the corporate and cautious culture of mainstream journalism and the completely bonkers blogosphere.
Six weeks later, I registered Drudge.Com. It's hard to believe that Matt Drudge remains one of the most important journalists in the U.S., 10 years after he nabbed somebody else's scoop. I wish someone had told me, when I was enrolling in journalism school, that the road to becoming my generation's Edward R. Murrow passed through the CBS gift shop.
In honor of this milestone, the Retort has brought out its version of the siren: News Alert Banana.
As much as I'm loathe to give a compliment here, every news blogger and online journalist is an heir to Drudge, who realized before anyone else that all journalists are created equal on the browser's address bar.
So happy Monicaversary, everyone! I trust that you don't need to be told how this anniversary should be celebrated.
Sterling Camden, Simone Carletti Join RSS Advisory Board
Two new members have joined the RSS Advisory Board: Sterling "Chip" Camden and Simone Carletti.
Camden's a software developer who covers technology and programming topics for TechRepublic. He also writes about RSS frequently on his weblogs Chip's Quips and Chip's Tips.
A commercial programmer since 1978, Camden has created the OPML Blogroll and OPML Browser widgets for the WordPress weblog publishing platform. He's also a supporter of the yearly Providing Autism Research golf tournament in Pleasanton, Calif.
The first Italian to serve on the board, Carletti is a technical manager at Altura Labs and a contributor to the instructional web publishing site HTML.it. He specializes in RSS-related issues.
Carletti's also the author of the Italian translation of the RSS specification.
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